Django loaddata - Out of Memory

Question

I made a dump of my db using dumpdata and it created a 500mb json file

now I am trying to use loaddata to restore the db, but seems like Django tries to load the entire file into memory before applying it and i get an out of memory error and the process is killed.

Isn't there a way to bypass this problem?

Answer 1

loaddata is generally use for fixtures, i.e. a small number of database objects to get your system started and for tests rather than for large chunks of data. If you're hitting memory limits then you're probably not using it for the right purpose.

If you still have the original database, you should use something more suited to the purpose, like PostgreSQL's pg_dump or MySQL's mysqldump.

Answer 2

As Joe pointed out, PostgreSQL's pg_dump or MySQL's mysqldump is more suited in your case.

In case you have lost your original database, there are 2 ways you could try to get your data back:

One: Find another machine, that have more memory and can access to your database. Build your project on that machine, and run the loaddata command on that machine.

I know it sounds silly. But it is the quickest way if your can run django on your laptop and can connect to the db remotely.

Two: Hack the Django source code.

Check the code in django.core.erializers.json.py:

def Deserializer(stream_or_string, **options):
    """
    Deserialize a stream or string of JSON data.
    """
    if not isinstance(stream_or_string, (bytes, six.string_types)):
        stream_or_string = stream_or_string.read()
    if isinstance(stream_or_string, bytes):
        stream_or_string = stream_or_string.decode('utf-8')
    try:
        objects = json.loads(stream_or_string)
        for obj in PythonDeserializer(objects, **options):
            yield obj
    except GeneratorExit:
        raise
    except Exception as e:
        # Map to deserializer error
        six.reraise(DeserializationError, DeserializationError(e), sys.exc_info()[2])

The code below is the problem. The json module in the stdlib only accepts string, and cant not handle stream lazily. So django load all the content of a json file into the memory.

stream_or_string = stream_or_string.read()
objects = json.loads(stream_or_string)

You could optimize those code with py-yajl. py-yajl creates an alternative to the built in json.loads and json.dumps using yajl.

Answer 3

I ran into this problem migrating data from a Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL, so sqldump and pg_dump weren't an option for me. I split my json fixtures into chunks that would fit in memory (about 1M rows for a wide table and 64GB ram).

def dump_json(model, batch_len=1000000):
    "Dump database records to a json file in Django fixture format, one file for each batch of 1M records"
    JSONSerializer = serializers.get_serializer("json")
    jser = JSONSerializer()
    for i, partial_qs in enumerate(util.generate_slices(model.objects.all(), batch_len=batch_len)):
        with open(model._meta.app_label + '--' + model._meta.object_name + '--%04d.json' % i, 'w') as fpout:
            jser.serialize(partial_qs, indent=1, stream=fpout)

You can then load them with manage.py loaddata <app_name>--<model_name>*.json. But in my case I had to first sed the files to change the model and app names so they'd load to the right database. I also nulled the pk because I'd changed the pk to be an AutoField (best practice for django).

sed -e 's/^\ \"pk\"\:\ \".*\"\,/"pk": null,/g' -i *.json
sed -e 's/^\ \"model\"\:\ \"old_app_name\.old_model_name\"\,/\ \"model\"\:\ "new_app_name\.new_model_name\"\,/g' -i *.json

You might find pug useful. It's a FOSS python package of similarly hacky tools for handling large migration and data mining tasks in django.